The Devil's Mistress by David Barclay (summer reads txt) 📗

wind is howling. Folks shouting down near the water. Noises in the forest are even stranger. Weird buzzing like I never heard before.”

Jacob stared at her, wanting to disbelieve and yet hearing the truth in her words. He turned to the doctor. “I want you to take her and leave town.”

“Her?” Moberrey asked incredulously.

Jacob took a step closer. “Yes. If any harm comes to her, I will track you down and put you in your place. In the ground, if I have to. Do you understand?”

Moberrey looked at Delia sideways. He gulped audibly.

“Do you know a safe place?” Jacob asked.

“My brother has a house with pigs…uh, farm, to the west.” Any thoughts of detaining the pair of them seemed to have blown away on the wind.

“Go there. Take Mister Beauchamp if you can, but no matter what happens, don’t come back until morning.” Jacob considered, then said, “Until two mornings from now.”

“What about you?” Delia asked.

Gently, Jacob took the flintlock from her hands. She looked relieved to lose it. “I may not move quickly, but I can shoot. Whatever it is…” He stopped as an unwelcome thought entered his mind. “Whoever it is, I’ll make this right. I have to.”

The old woman searched his face. Then seeing the truth and heartbreak within it, nodded as she fought back tears of her own.

Chapter 24

Sloop stood at the north end of the mill, watching the last of the townsfolk rush down the trail. “Hold! Stand fast, you cowards!”

But they would not stand fast. One after the other, they ran across the rocks and down the path to Saint Joseph’s Circle. Even Marianne had given up pretense and was now elbowing her way through the crowd.

“Madam Huxley,” Sloop cried. “Where are you going?”

“For God’s sake, Tiberius. Do you not see what is happening? I’m going to find my son!”

Then she was gone, the top of her regal coiffure disappearing into the sweaty throngs. The roaches filtered out the doors after her, following the crowd down through the forest. Sloop stood at the entrance of the mill, a lone, holy warrior atop the mountain. After a moment, he resolved there was nothing to do but follow the others back to town. He would go to his parish. For there lay the weapons he required: the crucifix, the holy water, the rosary. These would allow him to stand against the night, and stand he would. Had he not done the same in his very own Nottingham, as a young man? Had he not sent nine women to the fire and rejoiced as their flesh blackened beneath the holy flames?

Sloop began to walk. He had taken no more than a dozen steps when a scent came upon the air. Meat cooking upon a spit. It came not from the mill behind him but from the trees ahead, as if someone had stolen the Huxley’s roast pig and carried it into the wood. The scent grew stronger as he walked, assaulting his nostrils until he was forced to stop and question whether or not his senses had betrayed him.

He turned and suddenly found himself face to face with a human foot. A woman had been crucified upon a nearby tree, her legs hanging down before him. Her skin had been burned off, exposing the bloody red musculature beneath. She stared at him through lidless, yellow eyes, the remains of which lay cooked within their sockets and oozing down her cheeks.

Sloop stumbled, crying out in surprise and revulsion. But while strung up and deformed, the thing upon the tree was not dead. Its head tracked the old priest, smiling through a row of grisly, red-rimmed teeth. “Liar,” it whispered.

The old man turned about face. There was a second victim crucified upon another tree, another woman with blackened, melted skin. “Liar,” it said.

He turned again, seeing a third woman, and a fourth. Nine in all, strung up by the arms and cooked where they hung.

One of the victims wore a medallion which had fused to her skin in the heat. Did not Patricia Dornell, the very first witch he ever condemned, wear such a medallion? She was not the only one he recognized. Did not the two figures next to her resemble the mother and daughter he burned upon the River Trent? Did the figure with the hole in its skull not resemble Susan Heape, the woman whose head grew so hot it literally popped like a cooked acorn?

“Devilry,” he whispered. He made the sign of the cross, running down the path in search of his church.

The path twisted, and before he knew it, he was back in the same small clearing, facing the same, deformed crucifixions.

“Liar,” they said.

Sloop ran back in the direction he had come, and again came upon the same tableau. He ran to the left, cutting through the forest proper. He tried running to the right, then back toward the mill. Each time, he returned to the same scene. Each time, the gruesome figures awaited his return, tracking his movements with their bubbling, lidless eyes.

“Liar,” they chanted. “Liar. Liar.”

Sloop turned toward the last woman he remembered from Nottingham, a girl of eighteen named Audrey Gallop who died in the fire almost four decades earlier. He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled as hard as he could, hoping to wrest her from her burning perch. What little skin remained sloughed into his hands like a used garment, and he fell backward onto his haunches.

“Silence,” he shouted, squeezing his eyes shut. “God curse you, be silent, you hateful harpies!”

To his shock and surprise, the chanting stopped. He opened his eyes and found himself back upon a deserted path. Where the figures had been was nothing but the empty wood.

No. Not empty.

There was someone at his back. Someone with pale, white skin and long, icy fingers. Those fingers dug into the meat of his shoulders. “We’ve seen the fate of the women who cross your path in your life, Tiberius. Would you like